Granta 131: The Map is Not the Territory – with Janine di Giovanni and Charles Glass

Granta 131 explores the gaps between representation and reality, and what happens when those distinctions blur. Looking at the human realities behind the topographies of war, Janine di Giovanni and Charles Glass will be in conversation with Granta magazine’s editor Sigrid Rausing about their contributions to the issue.

Janine di Giovanni is the Middle East editor of Newsweek. A war and conflict reporter for twenty-five years, she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was recently made an Ochberg Fellow at Columbia University for her work on trauma victims. She also advices the United Nations Refugee Agency and the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. In ‘After Zero Hour’ from Granta 131, di Giovanni recounts her experiences reporting on Iraq’s seemingly endless cycle of conflicts and remembers old friends who have disappeared, emigrated or fled.

Charles Glass is a broadcaster, journalist and writer, who began his journalistic career in 1973 at the ABC News Beirut bureau and was chief Middle East correspondent from 1983 to 1993. Since then, he has been a freelance writer, and is the author of four books on the Middle East including the forthcoming Syria Burning. In ‘The Battle for Kessab ’ from Granta 131, Glass recounts the fate of the last Armenian town in Syria, after the Turkish Army relinquished control of portions of its border with Syria to ragged units of Islamist rebels in March 2014. Glass places this event in the wider context of the 1915 Turkish genocide of Armenians and Turkey’s continuing denial of those events.

Sigrid Rausing is the publisher of Granta magazine and Granta Books. In 1993-4 she lived on a collective farm in Estonia doing fieldwork for a PhD in Social Anthropology at University College London, followed by a two-year honorary fellowship in the same department. Her book Everything is Wonderful: Memories of a Collective Farm in Estonia was published by Grove Press in 2014. She serves on the advisory board of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, and is an Emeritus member of the international board of Human Rights Watch. In 2010 she was made an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics.

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